Case Closed: Moore’s Ford Bridge Massacre “1946”

On July 25, 1946, two young black women and two young black men were dragged from a car on Moore’s Ford Bridge in Monroe, Georgia by a white mob and murdered.

The story starts when a local black laborer, Roger Malcolm, stabs the son of a white farmer. Malcolm was jailed but bailed out by a local white landowner and bootlegger Loy Harrison. As the men rode home a third passenger, a black man by the name of George Dorsey accompanied them, and the two black men’s common law wives. Dorsey Malcolm, however, was seven months pregnant. During the ride, the black men noticed that Harrison was not taking the usual route home. The route ended up with the group on the Moore’s Ford Bridge.

On the bridge a white mob was waiting, the black men were pulled out of the car and beaten. A noose was pulled over Malcolm’s head and tightened around his neck. Their wives fought and screamed and the mob found a way to break their arms. The mob turned into a firing squad and riddled each of the victims with bullets. After the young black men and women lay dead in the dirt. The white mob got in their cars and drove back to their everyday life.

The victim’s bodies were so torn apart with the bullets, family members could barely identify them. No one in the white mob wore a mask, yet Harrison told the police he did not recognize any of them. No one was ever charged in the murders.

In 1991, Clinton Adams came forward. Adams, the son of poor white sharecroppers, had grown up in the Monroe area and had spent years moving around, fearful of that if he spoke of what he knew that would be repercussions. He decided to talk to the FBI after losing his leg in an accident in 1990. “I can’t run no more,” he said at the time, explaining his decision to speak out. Adams was 10 in 1946, he claimed to have hidden in the woods and watched the killings that took place. However, the men he named involved with the lynchings were long dead as well as the sheriff who warned him to keep his mouth shut.

Moore’s Ford Bridge was one just one area with America’s dark secret of lynching but right within a few miles, there were several other lynchings and murders of blacks that took place. As of January 2018, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has officially closed the Moore’s Ford lynching investigation, ending the effort to bring to justice members of the white mob who shot and killed the two black couples.